Conventional inventory rental models are typically based upon renting items for fixed rental periods and charging late fees for keeping rented items beyond a specified return date. These types of inventory models suffer from several significant limitations. First, conventional rental models require customers to make the decision of what items to rent at substantially the same time as the decision of when to rent the items. An example that illustrates this limitation is a video rental business. Customers go to a video rental store and select particular movies to rent at that time. The customers take the movies home and must return them by a particular due date or be charged a late fee. In this situation, the customers cannot decide what movies to rent before actually renting them. The customers may have a particular movie in mind, but there is no guarantee that the video rental store has the particular movie in stock. Moreover, due dates are inconvenient for customers, particularly for “new release” movies that are generally due back the next day.
Given the current demand for inventory rental and the limitations in the prior approaches, an approach for renting items to customers that does not suffer from limitations associated with conventional inventory rental models is highly desirable. In particular, an approach for renting inventory items to customers that allows separation of customers' decisions of what items to rent from when to rent the items is highly desirable.
There is a further need for an approach for renting items to customers on a continuous basis that avoids the use of fixed due dates or rental “windows” appurtenant to conventional rental models.
There is yet a further need for an approach for renting movies, games and music to customers that is more convenient and flexible to customers than conventional approaches.
In certain online rental approaches, customers who desire to rent items from an online rental service establish an account with the rental service, pay a fee, and establish a queue of rental items. A limitation of this approach is that in a multi-person household, such as a family household, each family member is required to establish a separate account with the service. This approach limits the ability for one member of the household, such as a parent, to view or control the contents of a rental queue established by another member of the household, such as a child. For example, in online movie rental, a parent may wish to prevent a child from adding movies that have MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) ratings of “PG-13”, “R”, or “NC-17” to the child's queue. Another drawback of this approach is that it limits the ability for any member of the household to enter their own ratings for any movie and receive personalized recommendations based on those ratings.
Further, the use of individual accounts for multiple persons in a household reduces barriers to changing service providers. When each person in a household has his or her own account with the service provider, any of the persons may elect to change to a competitive service provider without significant effect on the other persons. Service providers would like to create a disincentive for such change.